[ Ports ] [ Debian for Sparc ] [ Credits ] [ Porting ] [ Problems ]

Debian SPARC Porting Documentation

Porting Debian Packages to SPARC

If you want to be an official porter, you must be a registered Debian developer. That is, your public key must appear in the official keyring.

The Debian SPARC porting effort is now organized around the excellent wanna-build system, first used for the m68k port. With wanna-build in place, porting boils down to locating the packages where automatic compilation failed, and then going though and determining what went wrong.

Failed build logs can be found at the SPARC buildd web pages. Also, you can email wanna-build and ask it for the failed build logs (see the file README.mail from the wanna-build distribution).

quinn-diff output, which includes a report of packages by distribution which are out of sync in for the SPARC port can be found at http://buildd.debian.org/quinn-diff/output/unstable/by_priority_split-sparc.txt.

Serious porters should learn how to interact with wanna-build via email. You'll need to ask Ben Collins <bcollins@debian.org> to add your public key to the known list of keys.

All Debian developers can use Debian's auric and vore machines to test their packages on the SPARC architecture.

I'm not an official developer; can I still help?

Certainly. In fact, most of the real work in a Debian port requires not official status, just knowledge. There are a number of things you can do:

Track down bugs, and report them to the Debian Bug Tracking System.
Figure out patches for known bugs. Be sure to submit the patch to the Bug Tracking System!
Help with documentation. Most documentation areas are managed under CVS, and most documentation authors can give out CVS access to non-porters who are interested in helping.

So, go ahead and email <debian-sparc@lists.debian.org> with a description of how you'd like to help; we're sure someone there can get you started.